Eva Gonzalès was born in Paris in 1849, into a bourgeois family of Spanish origin where the arts were valued; her father was a novelist and playwright, while her mother was a musician.

She joined Charles Chaplin's women's workshop in 1866, followed by Édouard Manet's in 1869. Her style started within formal impressionism, a movement with which she was heavily associated, before developing her own approach to impressionist painting by the mid 1870s.

She began exhibiting in Salons from 1870 onwards, where her painting was often touted for having feminine qualities. Despite this, in 1874, her large-scale painting, Box at the Théâtre des Italiens, was characterized by the Salon jury as having ‘masculine vigor,’ which led them to reject it with questions as to her painting's authenticity.

Eva Gonzalès depicted mostly female subjects, exploring themes often associated with male artists, such as female toilette scenes; within her paintings, these scenes abandon eroticism to focus on intimacy.